Luke Williams
Williams is the inventor of 30+ U.S. patents and has designed more than 100 products in industries ranging from transportation to finance, and healthcare to consumer electronics. He is a fellow at Frog Design, one of the world’s most influential product strategy and design firms. His instruction on innovation has been sought by many of the world’s largest corporations and most agile startups.
Williams has addressed the UN General Assembly on the future of entrepreneurship; facilitated innovation workshops for the World Economic Forum; lectured in 21 countries, and has been featured in media ranging from Bloomberg BusinessWeek and Fast Company to The Wall Street Journal.
The author of Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business, Williams outlines the keys to success in a world of non-stop change. He uses references from his consulting experience and examples from popular culture to present radical ideas and show audiences a new way of thinking has the power to transform business.
Advocating disruptive hypotheses as means to counterbalance the ideas improving the current business model, Luke believes that both are needed in order for a business to succeed in the long-term. He helps brands to more effectively create inventive strategies that will turn customer expectations upside down and will redefine the way they look at competition. Luke also challenges the ingrained orthodoxies and patterns of perception that can lead to creative stagnation by helping your organization to deliberately break out of these patterns and to think differently on command.
Disruptive Thinking: How to Spark Transformation in Your Business
Successful companies operating in mature industries that embrace incremental change find themselves on a path that gets narrower and narrower. Eventually, they reach the end of the path, and by then, their customers have forsaken them for a new offering that nobody saw coming. In cases where companies do take disruptive risks, it’s often because they’re backed into a corner and there’s no other choice. But companies that try to differentiate themselves by focusing on incremental innovation instead of game-changing, disruptive innovation will differentiate themselves right out of business. They simply cannot afford to wait until they get backed into a corner. Companies need to be consistently making bold moves, even at the very peak of their success. It is an essential skill for anyone in business, from a small start-up to a global corporation, with the desire to transform organizational processes and behaviors, and ask, “Why hadn’t we ever thought about our business and industry this way before.
Disruptive Technologies: How to Prepare for What’s Coming Next
As much as we might desire it, the future we face will not be predictable. We are living in a fast-changing and uncertain time and we are entering this new global order with a way of seeing and thinking better suited for a world now several centuries behind us. A world that could be explained in simpler terms, when you could expect and carefully plan for gradual shifts in the status quo. But the scale of the challenges we face and the accelerating speed of innovation in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Biotechnology demands a new way of opening minds to unconventional strategies. Winning organizations in the next decade will need to incorporate a steady stream of disruptive technologies to stay ahead of the game—technologies that will force them to rethink the habits that have made them successful in the past, and challenge the conventional wisdom that has defined the competitive dynamics of their industry.
Disruptive Leadership: Thriving in an Era of Constant Change
What does it take to be a disruptive leader? Do you need to be a brilliant agitator like Steve Jobs? A driven workaholic with a passion to change the world like Tesla’s Elon Musk? Sure, CEOs like that get a lot of press, but there’s more to success than being loud and charismatic. Truly disruptive leaders are like Master Chefs on a cooking show, always looking for ways to take existing ingredients— the same ones everyone else has access to—and combine them in unique ways. Those new recipes are a type of investment capital: the more you have, the better. Of course, not all of them will succeed. But disruptive thinking and leadership is less about the success of any one idea and more about putting your business in a position where you have more new ideas to spend than your competition does. Most importantly, being a disruptive leader is about creating a culture where everyone values new recipes. Because if you want to build a disruptive organization, you first have to build more disruptive leaders.
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